Plutarch de Defectu Oraculorum contains a strange story, attributed to one Epitherses, a teacher of grammar. As the ship on which he was sailing for Italy came into the shadow of Paxos, a small island in the Ionian Sea, a voice called out three times for the pilot, Thamus, an Egyptian. It commanded him to sail to Palodes, another island not far distant and there to proclaim that the Great God Pan is dead. The pilot was dubious, and finally determined that only if the sea were calm near Palodes would he obey the command. A little short of landfall the wind suddenly ceased, and all was quiet.

When Dante speaks of the “way of our life” in the first line of his poem, he is using a figure that was familiar in his day and has become a banality in ours. It is especially important in the Divine Comedy, however, for it helps set off that great work from the bizarre travel literature which preceded it in the Middle Ages, and which we have come to call the literature of “oltretomba.” Dante's journey is different, for it is not a dream and it is not his alone. It is an allegorical representation of a spiritual development: the cammino of man in this life. Dante's literary ancestor is Plato, and not Tnugdalus, and his Inferno, like Plato's cave, is the place where all men come to know themselves. St. Bonaventure was the medieval theorist who worked out the metaphor of the itinerarium mentis in great detail, but it remained for Dante to write the work which gave the metaphor substance and made great poetry from a figure of speech.

Michelangelo Buonarroti's influence upon baroque sculpture is now widely recognised by historians. Ever since that morning in 1506 when he and the Sangalli, father and son, watched the white Pentelic marble of the Laokoön emerge from the farmland of Felice de Freddis near the Baths of Titus, Michelangelo's restless mind found authority in antiquity for a revision of his aesthetic canons. In this agonising group Michelangelo found justification for moving beyond the symmetry, restraint, and proportione divina of the Donatellian mode of sculpture, the static scientism of Da Vinci's painting, and the Vitruvian rules of architecture—even though he paid lip service to those rules and even recited them to popes. Whereas Michelangelo did not acknowledge this influence in writing, or apparently in speaking, his contorted and anguished Haman (1511–12) on the spandrel of the Sistine Vault was an admission of the influence of this Rhodian group —just as El Greco's newly-restored Laokoön in Washington acknowledges it as the one work of art which initiated European baroque. Moreover, the anguishes of the Vatican Laokoön and the expressions thereof were to parallel those tensions—visible even in his death mask—of Michelangelo's own soul and to leave an imprint upon his poetry. Laokoön, it should be remembered in view of his impact upon European baroque, was a militant, ritualistic priest.

A study of the significance of the mistakes in Twelfth Night, like the study of any important aspect of Shakespeare's art, must be made upon several levels, for mistakes by the protagonists are both a part of the superficial fabric of the plot and a subtle means of revealing underlying themes that often manifest themselves only indirectly below the surface action. This is not to say that the artificial devices of disguises and mistaken identities, all timeworn devices, are nothing more than a mere plot framework for the profundities that lie beneath. Rather, as Miss Bradbrook expresses it, there is an “interdependence of the natural and the artificial, the human and the literary.” The ridiculous mistakes that control the plot are therefore like Freudian slips which incite their superficial laughter and at the same time reveal subconscious patterns of human behavior. It is these slips, the mistakes of all the leading characters, that we must follow into the thematic material of the play, for it is on this level that they become of most interest.

Saint-Evremond has earned a place in the history of seventeenth-century dramatic criticism as a fervent admirer of Corneille and a hostile critic of Racine. His strong affinity for Molière is less well-known, because he wrote very little about him. Not considering himself a professional author, he never felt the need to give full expression to his opinions on literature, or on any subject. In his youth he was primarily a railleur; as literary criticism, his first work, La Comédie des académistes, is a pungent satirical attack on pretension, triviality, and excessive concern with minutiae of vocabulary and technique. The satirical impulse remains present, in a more subdued form, in most of his later works. He probes into the weaknesses of ancient and modern literatures more frequently than he celebrates their merits. His discussions of authors he particularly admires, Montaigne, Voiture, Malherbe, Cervantes, are very brief. Most of his critical essays are directed against aberrations in judgment, insufficiencies, and misconceptions. Dissertation sur Alexandre, Sur les caractères des tragédies, A un auteur qui me demandait mon sentiment d'une pièce où l'héroïne ne faisait que se lamenter, Discours sur les historiens français, Sur nos comédies, De la comédie italienne, Sur les opéras, Observations sur le goüt et le discernement des français—all these are essays emphasizing various weaknesses in modern literature and taste. Réflexions sur nos traducteurs and Du merveilleux qui se trouve dans les poèmes des anciens are equally critical of certain aspects of ancient literature, while De la tragédie ancienne et moderne is an attack on both. It is true that a large part of his criticism of the drama deals with Corneille, whom he admired more than any other author, but his defense of Corneille often takes the form of an attack against the corrupt modern taste which has turned against him. His searching and critical mind preferred to contradict a generally accepted opinion, to reveal the hidden weaknesses of a universally admired work, rather than to define the qualities of the authors it enjoyed.

Most dryden scholars believe that Religio Laici (1682) is not a statement of the Anglican position, though the poet asserts that it is. In fact, the widely accepted view is that it is a Catholic poem in spirit. This interpretation was established by Louis I. Bredvold in a very influential book, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (1934), in which he stated, “Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther are so closely allied in their philosophy that the earlier poem might be regarded as a sort of prelude or introduction to the later.” Prior to Bredvold's pronouncement, some critics had questioned the orthodoxy of Religio Laici as an Anglican poem, and had suggested that Dryden was troubled by religious doubts and that he was halfway on the road to Catholicism in 1682. It was Bredvold, however, who crystallized these views by asserting unequivocally that the poem was fideistic, and hence Catholic in thought and temper.

This paper owes its origin to three statements about Pope:

… I find your Practice the Prosodia of your Rules.—Henry Cromwell, letter to Pope, S December 1710.
… he [Pope] adhered rigidly to the rules laid down in it [his letter on prosody], both in the translation from Statius and in the Pastorals.-Edith Sitwell, Alexander Pope, p. 69.

A number of chapters—some definitive, others suggestive—have already appeared to afford us a clearer picture of the reception of United States writers and writings in Latin America. Studies on Franklin, Poe, Longfellow, and Whitman provide reasonably good coverage on major representative figures of our earlier literary years. There are other nineteenth-century writers, however, who deserve more extended treatment than that given in the summary and bibliographical studies available to date. A growing body of data may soon make possible the addition of several significant chapters with which to round out this period in the history of inter-American literary relations. Bryant and Dickinson will be the only poets to call for any specific attention. Fiction writers will prove more numerous. Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Hearn, Hart, Melville, and Twain will figure in varying degrees of prominence. Of these, some like Irving and Cooper early captured the Latin American imagination; others like Hawthorne, and particularly Melville, were to remain virtually unknown until our day. Paine and Prescott and Mann will represent yet other facets of American letters and thought.

A recent article of Leon Livingstone rightly calls attention to the importance of Pérez Galdós' assimilation of Cervantine irony as a forerunner of the concern of modern Spanish novelists about the autonomy of their characters. The unreality of rationalism, which Livingstone holds to be the germ of El amigo Manso, the imagination's capacity to create reality at the heart of Misericordia, lead to the even bolder experiments in the artistic representation of reality undertaken by Unamuno, Azorín, Valle-Inclán, and Pérez de Ayala. Anomalous for his time yet so pervasive in his work is Galdós' employment of “interior duplication” that a separate study would contribute to our fuller understanding of his art as well as to our measure of the advances in the Spanish novel of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The present essay focuses on Galdós' developing skill with internal repetitions from La Fontana de Oro (publ. 1870), through the rich complexities of the novels written between 1886–89, to their almost stylized simplicity in El abuelo (1897). Always related to Cervantine irony, the variety of verbal echoes, the mirroring of one character in another, the unconscious illumination each may offer the other, underscore the increasingly intimate wedding of form and matter with which Galdós came to unfold his narratives.

The increasing importance of the hand-image for Rilke is an indication of his steadily growing conviction that the plastic arts should become the guide for poetry. Consequently, the image of the hand occurs frequently in the early collections entitled Das Buch der Bilder (1902) and Das Stundenbuch (1906). Even in the first poem of Das Stundenbuch, written as early as 1899, Rilke shows a marked interest in plastic representation, which was to become the dominant influence upon his poetry during the period of his close acquaintance with the French sculptor Rodin a few years later:

Da neigt sich die Stunde und riihrt mich an
mit klarem, metallenem Schlag:
mir zittern die Sinne. Ich fiihle: ich kann—
und ich fasse den plastischen Tag.

Ortega has maintained in his Ideas sobre la novela that action is not the essence of a novel, a principle which he corroborates by the fact that most plots are readily forgotten. For Ortega, the novel's essence is pure being or nonaction, manifested by the state of its characters. One of the most conscientious practitioners of Ortegan theory was Benjamín Jarnés, who in Locura y muerte de nadie (Madrid, 1929) wrote a novel revealing human reality stripped of its vital core: action, passion, and sentiment. The process of devoiding reality of its real content while leaving a mere semblance of reality as the remainder is, of course, “dehumanization” in the Ortegan definition of the term. Two further aspects of Jarnés' novel—the absence of a personality in his protagonist and the use of a highly abstract, cerebral language—serve to supplement the meaning of “dehumanization” at least as far as narrative fiction is involved. But Locura y muerte… also commands attention because its author reaches out into areas of cultural and philosophical significance in order to determine the causes of a comparable dehumanization in contemporary life at the same time that he depicts this life fictionally. My procedure in this essay will be to discuss first Jarnés' notion of the interplay between the masses and the individual personality; then, in the light of this, the attitudes underlying his approach to this particular novel; and, finally, the techniques involved in the verbalization of his novel.

In an undated and so far unedited letter, now in the Joyce Collection at Cornell University, James Joyce wrote from Trieste, then in Austria, to his brother Stanislaus sometime in the autumn of 1905: “When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years, that it is the ‘second’ city of the British empire, that it is nearly three times as big as Venice it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world.” About the same time, 1 September 1905, Joyce asked Stanislaus by card: “Is it not possible for a few persons of character and culture to make Dublin a capital such as Christiania has become?” Sometime in the next year, 1906, Joyce wrote again to Stanislaus, this time from Rome: “The interest I took in socialism has left me. I have gradually slid down until I have ceased to take interest in any subject. I look at God and his theatre through the eyes of my fellow-clerks so that nothing surprises, moves, excites or disgusts me…. Yet I have certain ideas I would like to give form to : not as doctrine but as the continuation of the expression of myself which I now see I began in Chamber Music.”

In confuting Schlegel's ideas on the rôle of the chorus in Greek tragedy, Nietzsche said that he believed in an aesthetic audience and thought the single spectator to be the more capable, the more he was able to take the work of art as art, namely aesthetically. Some forty years thereafter modern drama felt called upon to awaken the spectator from his “illusionist period”—as if there had been any danger that, again in Nietzsche's words, the ideal spectator might rush onto the stage to free the God from his torment. Yet to prevent this once and for all seems to have been one of the foremost axioms of the Expressionist and kindred revolts of the first decade of this century.

There is a melancholy convenience in the fact that Dylan Thomas prepared his Collected Poems in the year before his death. The volume, like a last will and testament, contains all the poems that he wished to leave to the world. It is, in fact, a compilation of all five of his previously published volumes reproduced in sequence with very little alteration. Scholars and critics thus have an apparently settled corpus by which to judge Thomas' development in style and subject matter. Unfortunately the defin-itiveness of the Collected Poems, as far as chronology is concerned, is more apparent than real. The evidence given in this article shows that the order in which Thomas wrote his poems is quite different from the order in which they were published; so that statements about his development based on the sequence of the Collected Poems have had only limited validity.